Lessons From the Rubble

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The real tragedy of last week is that there may have been nobody in the world better placed to do that than Vieira de Mello. "The last thing Sergio wanted," said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, "was for the Americans to hand power to the U.N. What he wanted was to accelerate the passing of power to Iraqis." The heartfelt anguish at U.N. headquarters at Vieira de Mello's death was not just because he was--as former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke said--"dazzlingly good-looking and charismatic" but also because in a long career that had taken him from one world hot spot to another, he had shown a rare ability to solve problems. Chosen by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be in charge of nursing East Timor to independence from 1999 to 2002, Vieira de Mello performed brilliantly, taking a ravaged country and helping its leaders help their own people back to safety and security. "He had two skills that you don't usually find in the same person," said Holbrooke, who was a friend of Vieira de Mello's for more than 20 years. "He was a consensus builder, but he wasn't a lowest-common-denominator person. There was only one Sergio."

Now he's gone.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney and Mark Thompson/Washington; Simon Crittle/New York; Bruce Crumley/Paris; and Hassan Fattah, Aparisim Ghosh, Vivienne Walt and Michael Ware/Baghdad