20 years on, Sérgio de Mello’s Indian-origin friend opens up about his death in Baghdad, movie on him

Twenty years ago on August 19, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian-origin top UN diplomat whose life inspired the 2020 movie, Sergio, was killed in Baghdad, Iraq. His death was due to an Al Qaeda-led suicide bomb attack on the Canal Hotel headquarters of the UN months after the nation was invaded by US-led forces on a wrong premise. One of his closest associates, a former UN official who had worked with him in multiple roles as his donor and adviser at various trouble spots, including in East Timor and Kosovo, says for the first time that “it was a completely preventable death.”

Mukesh Kapila, Odisha-born, Punjabi-origin British veteran of humanitarian and conflict management, who is also a medical doctor and international public health specialist, tells Open in an interview, “The security (at the UN headquarters in Baghdad) at that time was weak.” So was the intelligence, he adds. “There was a lot of carelessness involved,” Kapila, who had worked in nearly 100 conflict-hit countries, including Rwanda and Sudan and countless others as a donor, advisor, and resources person, explains. But the 68-year-old hastens to add that “Sergio wouldn’t always listen, and did take risks”.

Kapila acquired international fame following his disclosures to the media in 2004 about the Darfur massacres starting in 2003 in Western Sudan — which is also known as the first genocide of the 21st century.

The dreaded terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack on Sérgio Vieira de Mello and his team. The UN senior official was 55 when he died after efforts to extricate him from the debris of the bombing failed due to slow work. He was then the United Nations Special Representative for Iraq and was considered a likely candidate for UN Secretary-General.

Kapila, who left India aged 16 on receiving a scholarship to study abroad and later became a physician, graduating from Oxford and Cambridge universities and later from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had worked with de Mello as a donor at the behest of the British Foreign Office while the latter was East Timor’s UN transitional administrator and a special UN envoy in Kosovo in the late 1990s and later. Kapila also worked at the UN office when de Mello was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Kapila would travel widely back then and on his return would enjoy the sunset outside the UN office of de Mello which overlooked a lake. They would engage in animated conversations on humanitarian crises and conflicts over pale Scottish whisky, Kapila recalls.

Sérgio Vieira de Mello wanted Kapila to work with him in Iraq. When the former left for Iraq, Kapila was in Sudan holding a crucial position at the insistence of then-UN chief Kofi Annan. Kapila, an author of several books, was then UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator with oversight of what was at the time the largest UN programme in the world with 1000 staffers under him with offices in Khartoum, Nairobi, and several others.

“It was around this time that Sergio called me to say he wanted me in Baghdad,” Kapila remembers. “’Look, come here; you will be my closest adviser. You will have a desk next to mine. We will be together,’ this was what he told me,” he notes, adding, “If I was his special adviser and if I were sitting next to him… you know what would have happened.” When Kapila heard the news of his friend’s death, he was at his home in Khartoum where, one late afternoon, his head of security called Kapila to announce the sad news: your friend Sergio is dead.

Asked about his impression of the movie, Sergio, directed by Greg Barker and starring Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as Sergio, Kapila says, “Yes. I have watched the movie. The incidents are true, but it is rubbish. The focus is on Sergio’s romantic relationships rather than on history. It distracts from the real story. I didn’t like the movie at all. It does a disservice to the man, and it doesn’t talk about the political challenges, the dilemmas, the negotiations, and other characters involved.” Wagner Moura earned global fame later playing the slain Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the series Narcos.

Kapil, who had worked with the UK’s NHS and later joined WHO, and the British Foreign Office, was later recruited to the UN by Kofi Annan post-9/11.

Now based in Geneva, Kapil is a professor emeritus of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester, a committed humanitarian and development leader who has travelled to interior parts of civil war-ravaged nations to check on the plight of people. In a video from Sudan, he is shown among women and children hiding in mountain caves to escape marauding rival armies. He has also earned the wrath of powerful dictators while on duty. Earlier in his career as an international public-health leader at the British Foreign Department, he was responsible for drafting programmes to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS.

In Baghdad on August 19, 2003, along with de Mello, Kapila lost several other friends, too. Worldwide, that day is now commemorated as World Humanitarian Day. Kapila is the author of best-selling books, including Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century; and War & Peace: The Story and Struggles of a Humanitarian.

In his book No Stranger to Kindness, he describes in detail his friendship and interactions with Sérgio Vieira de Mello. Kapila, who has also worked in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, was posted, besides the countries already mentioned, in Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sri Lanka, North Korea, Central Asian republics, and Latin America. An alumnus of St John’s School, Chandigarh, Kapila speaks and writes Punjabi and Hindi besides English, and is conversant in Urdu and Bengali. His parents, now in their 90s, live in Panchkula, near Chandigarh.

Kapila, who in 1971 decided on a British scholarship over an opportunity to go for higher studies in the former Soviet Union, says that he always wanted to be an actor. He never became one, but he is however glad that he became a man of action and was friends with the likes of Sérgio Vieira de Mello.

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