he scorching sun that kept Baghdad’s temperature stuck at 50C meant that we started our mornings early. That day I went into the kitchen to make hot chocolate for breakfast, but my plans were derailed when I realised that a power outage at dawn had spoilt the milk. We had to settle for Ovaltine diluted with water. My partner took my hand and said that it didn’t matter, soon we would be leaving for Rio de Janeiro. Then he took his briefcase and, for security, we headed in a convoy of cars towards the Canal hotel, where our office was. That day various important meetings had been cancelled, but we were nevertheless very busy wrapping up loose ends. Suddenly, everything went dark. The room seemed to splinter around me before turning to dust. The next time I saw him was hours later. Trapped in the rubble of a burning building, he struggled to maintain consciousness as I talked to him and tried unsuccessfully to pull him out of what was soon to become his grave. I worked for the United Nations for a decade. That day I survived what has been described as its own 9/11: the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq in August 2003. My husband, whom I failed to extricate from the rubble, was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian UN human rights commissioner and Iraq envoy. During my career I witnessed the United Nations at its best: making a country independent, giving its people a voice and future – in Timor in 1999. I also experienced it at its worst – in Iraq in 2003. As the organisation nears its 75th anniversary, it’s time we talked about both. In the shattering pain and loneliness of the bomb’s aftermath, it became clear to me that the Iraq operation had been doomed since its conception. The thousand tonnes of TNT used by the bomber not only demolished our workplace, it destroyed the fantasy that the UN was able to be an independent actor, free from political influence, an effective guardian of global norms and standards, of human and humanitarian rights and principles. Years earlier, I traded a promising career as an economist for the higher calling of bringing economic inclusion to the poor. I exchanged the comfort of the big city for conflict zones: first, Timor. There I supported widows stripped of their livelihoods by violent conflict. We helped orchestrate two elections, the writing of a national constitution and the creation of a central bank. We issued the first national passports. We enabled East Timor to become the UN’s 191st member and the first sovereign state of the new millennium. In Iraq, I planned the October 2003 UN Iraq development conference to secure international support. Sergio and I did not agree with the Iraq war, but lived the UN mission every day and felt loyalty to the values to which we had devoted our careers. We were worried about what would happen to civilians in occupied Baghdad once the military operation was over. The suicide bomber killed 21 of my colleagues instantaneously. Sergio, however, survived the initial blast. His death came after he had waited for four hours, in agony, for someone to rescue him. What ultimately killed him was lack of preparedness by the UN administration. Blast-resistant window film never made it through the bureaucratic tangle. My SOS satellite phone call to headquarters was obstructed by multiple hierarchical layers – before the actual line was cut off. The bomb rescue supplies consisted of a box of Band-Aids and a single stretcher. There was no other equipment to help the more than 200 injured. Obviously, many civilians in Iraq had to contend with similar lack of resources and violence. But we were supposed to be the ones helping them. And, despite arriving in the wake of the coalition invasion, we also fell foul of the carelessness and folly of the Bush administration. The disdain for our safety was at least partly due to a lingering bitterness on the part of the Americans towards the UN security council for not rubberstamping the invasion. But they were not the only ones responsible. While during the 2002-2004 debates over Iraq, France claimed to be the moral conscience of the world, the truth is that it had its own foreign policy priorities to advance. And its rivalry with les Anglo-Saxons was an important contributor to the tragedy. It was in the interest of both sides that the UN mission failed. For the US, to prove that the organisation was irrelevant; for the French, to tell the world “I told you so”. Clearly, the UN could not work like this, with its staff at the mercy of manipulation by big powers. The truth is that, instead of playing an independent role to safeguard the dignity of peoples, and ensuring respect for obligations from international law, Sergio and I found ourselves in Baghdad as pawns. This should have been the lesson of the Baghdad tragedy: you cannot operate to bring safety to human beings if you are yourself compromised in this way. However, these mistakes were swept under the rug. Although I witnessed the bombing and was one of the few survivors, my comments were not taken into account in the “report” about the attack, which ran to all of 28 pages. No court ever investigated what happened. Simultaneously, the organisation seemed to wash its hands of me. I was separated from my belongings, which were never returned, and the house we shared, which was emptied in my absence. My passport was taken. My health insurance abruptly cancelled. What crime had I committed to be treated like this? The UN did not recognise our civil union. I was thrown into a bureaucratic jumble and left to drown. I was told that there was no space for me at the commemoration a year later, and despite arriving there with Sergio’s mother, Gilda Vieira de Mello, we were refused seats. On the United Nations’ 75th anniversary, the question lingers as to whether the organisation remains fit for its stated purpose. Does it exist to save the world from war – and from the predatory and expansionist exercise of power? Or does it operate to perpetuate the power of a few founding members, who dispense justice but only when it suits their own narrow interests? The gap between rhetoric and action continues to widen. We hear how big powers increasingly handpick UN special representatives, testing the independence of its leadership. Or how the secretary general has left powerful governments off his annual list of those who have committed grave violations against children in armed conflict. Actions like this are incomprehensible and contradictory, and erode the organisation’s standing – as has its tardy reaction to the pandemic and inaction in Syria and Yemen. Instead of moving closer to Timor, we are moving back towards Iraq. After three-quarters of a century, this organisation, forged in optimism, needs to rediscover its vocation, the mission that made it so indispensable in the aftermath of wars and during crises. But it also needs to understand its failures, in order not to repeat them. Some people tell me I am being naive. But it was that naivety that took me and Sergio around the world to defend the extraordinary and vital nature of the UN. I will keep reminding people of that vision. I will do it because of my love for Sergio. I will do it for an institution in which, despite everything, millions of people around the world still invest their trust and their hopes for a better, more law-abiding world. • Carolina Larriera is a former UN diplomat, a survivor of the Iraq bombing, widow of Sergio Vieira de Mello, and former assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School