Time to Walk the Talk on Protecting Humanitarian Workers
Being An Opinion By Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths On World Humanitarian Day This World Humanitarian Day, we commemorate 20 years since that murderous day when terrorists detonated a suicide bomb outside the United Nations headquarters in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, on 19 August 2003. As the late UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said at the time, it was one of the darkest days in the history of the United Nations. It still is. For me, World Humanitarian Day will always be an occasion of mixed, and still raw, emotion. Among those killed that day was Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was serving as Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to Iraq. Sergio was my friend, and my daughter’s godfather. Sergio was devoted to the United Nations. He joined the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1969not long after leaving university, and he spent the rest of his tragically curtailed life with the...