Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  I decided that the guy had gone suicidal on us and began, unilaterally, to walk back up the stairs. Pasha saw me leave and immediately followed suit. The mad engineer waved for us to come back down, and we responded by waving “bye, bye.”

  Our escape from the Derbandikhan Dam was not our most heroic hour, but then again, on our way back, a (real) engineer confirmed to us that the threat of complete collapse was very real indeed. A U.S. bomb had exploded on its edge during Operation Desert Storm, damaging its underlying structure.

  It was all I needed to hear before ordering my first beer at The Edge once we got back to Erbil. It felt rather nice being in a Western-style bar, and furthermore, it was an opportunity to take the pulse of our humanitarian community in a less formal setting. The Edge was not the kind of place where people came for wine tastings. Beer and liquor flowed nonstop, and old pop tunes from the 1980s forced the crowd to make loud conversation. Yanna welcomed us warmly. She wore a deep décolleté for the occasion of our visit. Partly as a result, Pasha and I were riveted by what she had to say.

  Yanna was one of an extremely diverse group of people who, for whatever reason, had come to work in Iraqi Kurdistan either with the UN or with NGOs. To see this smiling sunshiny thirty-year-old Finnish woman after ten days of meetings with men was incredibly refreshing. After my second beer, I started wondering “what a woman like her was doing in a place like this.” I shared my question with my friend Habibi, who reminded me that Yanna was not Ingrid Bergman, that I was not Humphrey Bogart, and that this was not exactly Rick’s Café. He took me by the arm, yanked me away (leaving Pasha to extol on his many merits), and introduced me to other colleagues. They were all eager to vent to me about the frustrations of working in the field while people at UN headquarters (i.e., my bosses) rolled their thumbs and messed up their initiatives with red tape. To apologize on behalf of UN headquarters I kept buying them rounds of drinks.

  The more lubed up we all got, the more interesting the conversations became. Someone who had traveled with us from Baghdad told me that he and some colleagues were sitting in their hotel room chatting one night when suddenly they heard their conversation replayed from some kind of recording device located on the other side of the wall. An Iraqi intelligence agent must have pressed the wrong button and rewound his tape recorder.

  The incident did not surprise me. I had seen enough evidence that, in the region under Saddam’s control, we were under constant surveillance. But I was shocked to learn that no official complaint about the incident had been made to the Iraqi authorities. The staffers had told their boss about it, but all he did was shrug it off. It seemed to me we should have made a scandal of it. But I suppose the UN was so used to getting spied on by all sides that there was no desire, at the top of our bureaucracy, to challenge Baghdad (or Washington or London or Moscow or Paris or Beijing) about their nasty spying habits.

  In Baghdad, rumor had it that some of our staff had been blackmailed into collaborating with the Iraqi authorities after being caught in a “Kodak moment” with Iraqi prostitutes. Others were accused of taking bribes or being intimidated into inappropriate collaboration with their Iraqi counterparts. There were many ways the Iraqi authorities could make life hell for our staff, and now that my colleagues were in Kurdistan, they were pouring their hearts out. They spoke of how they had been forced to hire local Iraqi staff who were cousins of power figures of the regime. These staff members did very little productive work other than to report back to the Iraqi security services on our activities. They could not be fired. Sometimes, they would even threaten their UN bosses directly. Was this scandalous? Yes. But this was not the time for me to throw a fit. I needed to listen and gain all the information I could.

  Threats against UN personnel could not be taken lightly. Occasionally, there had been direct attacks against our staff. A couple sitting in a field had been shot at close range by two armed assailants, seemingly without reason. The man was killed and the woman rolled over, down a hillside, and played dead, miraculously sparing her own life. The UN didn’t have the capacity to investigate whether this was a random crime, but clearly none of the victims were robbed. And we knew Saddam Hussein had operatives working in the region. Other “random attacks” included shooting sprees at some of our agency headquarters, extreme cases of food poisoning, and mysterious car accidents. So when our staff received a veiled threat from an Iraqi intelligence officer/local employee, they were well advised to take it seriously—especially since they had no recourse inside the UN, given the nonchalance of our successive humanitarian coordinators in Iraq, whose policy it was to just cave in to pressure from the Iraqi government on all questions concerning the security of their staff.

  On some occasions we had to evacuate people the government explicitly designated as those whose “security could no longer be guaranteed.” Given the government’s ability to kill some of our staff without any consequences, one might consider such warnings generous on their part. My sense was that we should have alerted the press to any threats made against our staff and seized the UN Security Council with such matters every time they came up. But this went against all UN traditions. The people this organization sends to the field are clearly on their own. In a dictatorship such as Iraq, this meant they lived in fear just like the rest of the population. No wonder we weren’t getting any written reports of fraud or corruption from our staff in the field.

  Before speaking to my colleagues that night, I had not fully realized how much pressure they were under from the Iraqi authorities. I don’t know if I would have been better than any of them at withstanding such pressure. But one thing was clear: in the Kurdish areas they felt freer to speak their mind—not quite free enough to do so sober, but with the addition of an uncountable number of shots the picture became clear. The information I was collecting was evidently worth the investment in my own (declining) sobriety. That said, by the time I had gotten an earful, the room was beginning to spin.

  I glanced over at Pasha. He looked like he was boasting about something to Yanna. She must have poured him one too many drinks, because at some point, when traditional Greek music came on, he got up and started clapping his hands and tapping his right foot. Seeing the under secretary general clap, others in the room started clapping too, and Pasha got it into his head to put on a traditional Greek dance show. With the floor to himself, he launched into a dramatic range of movements that involved bouncing unexpectedly from one foot to the other, turning his head like a matador, and sliding around the floor on one knee.

  For a moment I admired him in all his ridiculousness. I hoped I would be just as capable as he of taking myself unseriously if and when I became under secretary general. But then Pasha’s momentum began to wane unmercifully. He tried to invite Yanna onto the dance floor with him, but the poor woman was laughing way too hard to make a move. So he grabbed someone else, an older woman whose erratic movements indicated she had had more than just water to drink. They danced wildly, making do with uncoordinated missteps until, ten minutes into the song, Pasha let his improvised partner go rather inconsiderately and sat back down, out of breath and drenched in sweat. He had put on a fantastic show, but if his intention had been to impress Yanna, it was the wrong approach. After catching his breath, he examined the knees of his suit, which he had ruined by sliding on a dirty floor, and decided it was time to go home. As he left, he muttered something about Yanna being a “facking tease.”

  Habibi and I decided to have another round of shots. Beyond that, my recollection is a blurry series of snapshots. The images involved me kissing Yanna somewhere outside the bar; Habibi and I jumping into a swimming pool with our clothes on to fish up someone’s shoe; and a wild scene in the lobby of our hotel, where I had to climb over two heavily armed peshmerga guards, who were sleeping on the floor under the front desk, in order to reach for our room keys. The final image I have of that night is of a woman named Rubina making her own run for the front desk to get her key and falling down on the Kurdi
sh guards. They were startled and almost shot us all; but seeing that we were foreigners, they soon went back to sleep. Before we reached our rooms, I saw Rubina writing her name and room number on Habibi’s forehead with a Bic pen, so he would remember to “knock on her door in the morning.”

  All these images slowly came back to me the next day when I was walking along a narrow marked path in a village that had been riddled with mines during the Iran-Iraq war. I was wearing a helmet and a flak jacket, even though the temperature exceeded that of the hottest sauna I had ever set foot in. I can safely say it was the mother of all hangovers.

  The minefield was located in a village that had been so thoroughly decimated it looked like nothing more than a heap of rubble with only a few random walls left standing. The former village of Mahmoud Quajar was located a few hundred yards from the border with Iran. It was being demined by a bunch of former British and Australian soldiers—people I regarded as true heroes for coming this far and risking their lives to save people they had never met before.

  Demining appeared to be one of the most tedious and nerve-racking jobs on earth. Inch by inch, the deminers had worked through the small patch of land on which we were standing, as they pointed out other unexploded ordnance only a few feet away. I was really grateful for the close look the deminers offered us, but I wished I was standing just about anywhere else.

  Mines come in all shapes and sizes. Some are designed to kill; some, merely to wound viciously. There are devices specially fabricated to castrate the victim, by springing up from the ground and exploding right below the waistline. This was why our flak jackets were specially outfitted with an uncomfortable metal-plated strap that I had tied around my crotch area.

  While sweating bullets, we tried to concentrate on the explanations being fed to us regarding the actual demining process. We learned that on flat terrain certain specially adapted vehicles can be used to clear minefields, but that in mountainous terrain the best method involves the use of dogs. Once trained, demining dogs never step on a mine. Their sense of smell is more reliable than any detection machine. Our dogs would occasionally get killed, not by mines but by people. In one instance, unidentified armed men killed nine of our dogs. The attackers broke into the place where the UN kept the dogs at night, aimed at the cages, and gunned them down at point-blank range with AK-47s. These were puppy dogs in training, killed before they could be deployed to the field. Seeing photographs of them lying in a pool of blood inside their cages was hard for all of us. And few of us had any doubts about who might have ordered the attack. The Iraqi regime had warned us on several occasions that our deminers were operating against their will.

  Did the UN make a fuss? Of course not. Just another inconclusive investigation, as if there could be any doubt, in anyone’s mind, about who could order such an act. In a region where 10,000 people had been killed or maimed by mines in the past decade, our operation had great support among the local population.

  When the attack occurred, I felt we would have a good chance of making the front page of tabloid newspapers if we shared the pictures, and would thereby dissuade Baghdad from conducting further such operations in the future. But I was not able to persuade the bureaucracy to do so and was not yet ready to operate as “my own man.”

  The expression had planted itself in my brain since my first briefing with Trevor (a.k.a. Spooky), and I was slowly beginning to understand the stakes involved in deciding whether I should follow my conscience or choose the easier, safer route of bureaucratic discipline and inertia. Deep inside I knew how this internal struggle would end. But I also knew that my time to rock the boat had not yet come. I had enough trouble trying to figure out how this gigantic operation stayed afloat despite all the dysfunctions I kept witnessing. I assumed I was missing a major piece of the puzzle—something that would explain why the UN never seemed to stand up for its own staff, its own mission, and its own principles. Perhaps the compromises we made allowed us to do more good than harm? After all, the demining operation was going ahead despite Baghdad’s attempts to undermine it . . . more slowly than we’d like, but moving forward nonetheless.

  But something in my gut made me want to either yell or throw up. Since neither action was particularly diplomatic, or even an effective form of expression, I kept telling myself, through this and other heart-wrenching moments, that my time to speak my mind would come.

  Meanwhile, the Iraqi government did everything it could to sabotage our demining efforts in Kurdistan. It blocked the importation of much-needed equipment, like GPS devices and metal detectors, and refused to give us maps of the mines its army had littered throughout the countryside to prevent the return of Kurds to their ancestral homes. Unfortunately, our deminers received far too little support from our successive humanitarian coordinators. Denis Halliday, in particular, was not very supportive of the demining program. None of his successors, or Pasha himself, ever went to bat for this part of the operation. But insofar as I knew Denis to be an honest humanitarian, his attitude was particularly frustrating to me. I felt like it was worth challenging him on that front, and the occasion came soon after our (rather awkward) visit to the minefield.

  On the car ride back from the village of Mahmoud Quajar, Denis spoke of scaling back the deminers’ activities, saying that their work was “provoking” the Iraqi government.

  “I think these guys are heroes,” I shot back. I could ill afford to get in the face of an assistant secretary general, but I was hungover, dehydrated, and overcaffeinated, and his stupid remark got on my nerves.

  “It’s irresponsible for the UN to be conducting demining operations so close to the Iranian border,” Denis continued.

  I was shocked. And confused. And I forgot my place in the power pyramid.

  “Maybe we should go back and remine the place?” I said, sort of to myself but loud enough to spark an uncomfortable silence.

  Denis had no response to my comment, nor was it clear that I expected one. If I didn’t have some admiration for the man, I would never have expressed myself so directly, in violation of basic protocol. But it felt good to speak my mind. And I knew that Denis was not the kind of person who would take vengeance on someone for merely disagreeing with him. So I just sat back and, for the first time since my arrival in Iraq, began to enjoy the tense silence my remarks had caused.

  Too bad my first mission was nearing an end. A few more weeks, and the reports from the Iraqi drivers might have earned me an official expulsion from the country.

  Saying what you mean—bluntly—to senior managers is not exactly a recipe for a successful UN career. But Denis Halliday was a rare type of UN bureaucrat, in that he actually enjoyed heated political debates. After recuperating from my rhetorical question on the mines, he engaged me on the wider issue of the sanctions, which he wanted the UN Security Council to lift altogether.

  My own opinion of the sanctions had entered a state of flux. Not to say schizophrenia. There was indeed something absurd about punishing Iraqi civilians for the sins of their dictator. At the same time, that dictator had repeatedly demonstrated the need for his containment. His wars, at home and abroad, had killed and maimed millions. But the sanctions had been harmful too, especially to the weakest elements of Iraq’s society. A silent war was being waged on the Iraqi people. The old, the sick, the widows, and the orphans were the hardest hit by the ongoing decrepitude of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. But what was the alternative? To lift all sanctions and let Saddam rebuild his army, reoccupy Kurdistan, and get back to the business of destroying villages and spreading mines?

  Not an option. The United States and Britain would never agree to lifting the sanctions on Saddam, even if Denis Halliday set himself on fire in Times Square to protest their policy. Deepening the Oil-for-Food compromise was the only way forward. Any improvement in the Iraqi people’s lives would have to come from us.

  The challenge before us was to put our politics aside and draw up a realistic plan to expand our operation. The aim,
as defined by our initial mandate, would be to provide more help to Iraq’s civilians without strengthening Saddam’s regime. The assumption that such a delicate mission was achievable was obviously naïve, as should have been evident to us by now. Had we consulted any businesspeople involved in international trade with dictatorial regimes on the viability of our mission, they might have died of strangulation induced by uncontrollable laughter. But our PhDs and our master’s degrees in international affairs did not equip us, or the diplomats sitting on the UN Security Council, for the realities that awaited us and that would, inevitably, draw us closer than any of us expected to the underworld of international corruption that makes our world economy go around.

  But ignorance was bliss, as it offered a common ground on which Pasha, Denis, and other UN leaders could agree. Our program needed to be expanded. How, exactly, and with what focus, would be the subject of heated internal turf wars in coming months. After seeing the demining operation in action, I hoped to lobby for its continued expansion. Insofar as I understood the nature of the relationship between Pasha and Denis, I was rather optimistic that the mere mention of Denis’s reluctance about the operation would automatically get Pasha to strengthen his support for it.

  Gee, was I beginning to figure out how to get things done inside the UN bureaucracy? I felt both optimistic and devious, righteous and manipulative. A truly strange combination of emotions. . . . I wondered if it had something to do with what they call the “gray zone” of politics.