Sergio in 2003 had one of the most frustrating missions and summers of his career, after 34 years of amassing all  of this expertise, after working in 14 war zones, speaking seven languages, running so many different negotiations, across so many issues and places, an expert on reconstruction, on elections, on  constitutions, on demobilizing police and, soldiers, on human rights, on justice and who you prosecute and how you prosecute – all these skills and yet he couldn’t really get the Americans in Iraq to take his calls.  They would take them. Pleasantries would be exchanged; but it was very hard for him to prevail upon the United States at a time when – it is very hard to remember – when the war seemed to be over where the violence against civilians had not started. Where there were still some residual attacks by insurgents against US forces, but those were the people who were called ‘dead-enders’ – remember that? The Dead-enders. And the feeling was that it was only a matter of time before the violence would be stomped out permanently and who was this UN guy anyway? Here he was talking about East Timor, as if East Timor has bearing on Iraq. He’s talking about Lebanon from 25 years ago. ‘There’s no terrorism in Iraq, why is telling us about Hezbollah and what happened in ‘82 and ’83 in Lebanon?’ In any event, an excruciating summer for Sergio one that was very, very frustrating but again he decided to stay in the room and be part of these peace negotiations, not throwing darts from outside, from afar. 

Ironically – I’ll tell you why it’s ironic in just a minute – on August 18^th 2003, after a summer of trying to negotiate with Paul Bremer, after trying to get the United States to roll back the demobilization of the Iraqi Army, which put a lot of Iraqi soldiers out on the street. After trying to get Bremer to issue a transparent calendar about when the handovers would occur – he eventually would do that, but not for another 6 months -- after trying to get detention policies to be systematized so that there was more oversight on US facilities and Iraqi detention facilities. Again it would be seven months before the Abu Ghraib scandal would break. But Sergio was trying to alert Bremer and General Sanchez to the worries that he had at that time. After failing and failing and failing privately, on August 18^th Sergio decided to issue his first two public criticisms of the coalition and issued two, or authorized two press releases, criticizing the coalition for an excessive use of force. On August 19^th those releases were just set to go out. It would have marked a real break for Sergio from his sort of private diplomacy, quiet diplomacy approach but he had felt by the 18th of August that the UN was being seen as being a tool of the occupation because all of this private diplomacy was being done but wasn’t effectual. Iraqis were starting to turn against United Nations but also against humanitarian organizations as a whole because they weren’t seeing separate values expressed apart from those expressed by the coalition.

Tragically – and the word tragically was meant for this occasion – on August 18^th at 4:30 pm, a truck pulled up outside Sergio’s window and let off 400 pounds of explosives a homemade bomb that was absolutely savage, with cluster munitions, and other things tied on. The explosion was absolutely devastating. About a third of the UN headquarters building collapsed. Sergio miraculously survived. 21 others were killed, most of them instantly. The Americans who were nearby behaved heroically in attempting to rescue not only him but others who were buried in the rubble. Tragically again, unfortunately, absurdly, although the United States had predicated the war in Iraq in part on a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, at least partly, no preparation had been done to respond to large scale terrorist attacks against civilian targets. So as Sergio lay beneath the rubble for three and a half hours alive, while American soldiers, again, individually behaved heroically -- and luckily that has been documented not only in my book but in a forthcoming HBO documentary – just unbelievable bravery of several, individual, mainly Reservists (a Reserve fireman from Connecticut and an EMT) -- all they had to work with was their bare hands because no equipment had been commandeered, no command and control had been set up,  in order to do search and rescue of a sophisticated kind in Iraq. One of them found a lady’s handbag in one of the offices in the United Nations, another a curtain rope and they created kind of an amateur pulley system, MacGyver-style, to try and rescue Sergio. After three and a half hours, they did actually succeed in rescuing a colleague of his who he’d been meeting with at the time of the bomb -- sawing off his legs and doing an ad hoc amputation in this shaft where it looked like the whole building was going to collapse s on top of them. But by the time they rescued this man, Paul Loescher, great refugee and human rights advocate, Sergio had died.

So, what lessons do we take from this life? Very, very briefly here, in closing. The first -- the lesson I take from spending so much time thinking about Sergio -- is that we do need new models. As I indicated at the beginning, people like Sergio are very rare; but there’s an awful lot of diplomacy going on now in the grey zones, that is being unstudied. That is going unexplored. I think how people who cross borders to do negotiations – not only track-two negotiations, multi-lateral negotiations, but negotiations now with stakeholders from very different countries and very different cultures, all in the room together. I don’t think we’ve yet begun to step back to really understand what modern negotiations entail.

Second, what I think made Sergio so unique was that he was both a doer, as I’ve described, but also very self-critical and reflective. This is a book that discussed his many flaws as well as his virtues, but I think that the singular virtue he brought to his work in peacemaking and trouble shooting was the power of adaptation that grew out of this self-criticism. I should mention that while he was doing all the missions I’ve described and while he was in all these dangerous places, he actually managed to get two PhDs as well, one on Kant and one on Hegel. Go figure. And the way he tried to inject his field experience into his understanding of the nature of evil, of the nature of human progress, of global governance, is a completely unique combination, I think.

Thirdly, Sergio was a great believer, as you can tell, in negotiating with the unlike-minded; and here, I think, there are lessons in his life -- not only for those who will go off and be global citizens or be negotiating even in our own communities, across political cleavages and so forth – there are real lessons there; but what I’m struck by is the degree to which in our own lives, we as citizens are becoming more and more insular, more prone to cohabit in our own little echo chambers. And if I see anything in Sergio’s progression, it’s the way he continues to value contact with the unlike-minded. Getting out of our little silos. The Internet was meant of course, to give all of us greater exposure to contrary perspectives; but to speak personally, I feel like it’s only making it easier for me to select out and actually not have to be exposed to contrary viewpoints. So I think we have to be aware, in our own society, of the polarization that is creeping in. Perversely aided by new technology that one has to guard against.  Of course this willingness to engage the unlike-minded is, I think, mirrored in a big foreign policy debate we’re having as a country as to what we do with our adversaries and whether we get in the room and at what level and for what end. I think that’s a very healthy conversation to be having, at long last. (I didn’t say anything controversial. I can say ‘considering all the variables, it’s very important to consider all the variables as we talk to our adversaries.’)

Fourth and final, final point and one that runs the risk of sounding a little like a platitude but I think is completely profound and potentially transformative  Sergio, if I had to pinpoint a core principle of his – not a core characteristic of his, but a core principle  that drove him in his dealings around the world but also in his dealings with his own staff -- is not the importance of democracy or humanitarianism or human rights or justice even. For him, the core concept was dignity. Dignity. Which occasionally you see pasted into a long list -- freedom, democracy, liberty, dignity. It’s usually on there. But as a concept I think it can include not only safety and physical security, the ability to be safe in your own person and with your family -- which so many people crave, here and around the world -- but also the principle of autonomy, of individual self-esteem, collective self-esteem. As we think about American foreign policy and how to get to the place that we don’t simply have citizen activists concerned about human consequences in Sudan and elsewhere, but a  foreign policy rooted in taking account of human consequences and embracing global cooperation, that dignity is a key concept that can both motivate particular policies and can also serve as a check on some of the impulses to talk to other countries and cultures in ways that can be antithetical to the very principles that we’re talking about. So I think dignity is a great take away.

Again what’s beautiful about Sergio’s ideas, really all of them -- being self-critical, talking to the unlike-minded, and privileging dignity -- is that they all have individual application as well. So why don’t I leave it there and we can get into discussion. Thank you.Continued.