BAGHDAD, 20 August 2003 — Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in yesterday’s Baghdad car bomb attack, is one of the leaders of a small band of UN troubleshooters sent to the frontline to clean up after a conflict.

The Brazilian diplomat has already served with honor in Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda and was temporarily moved from his role as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to become the UN secretary general’s special representative in Iraq in June.

Vieira de Mello was in his office at the UN headquarters in the Iraqi capital when he became one of the victims of the car bomb attack.

The 55-year-old has not spent much time in his office in recent days as he embarked on his latest nation-building mission. But after the battles on the UN Security Council over the US-led war on Iraq, this was always shaping up to be one of the biggest challenges of his long career at the United Nations.

Vieira de Mello already has a proven reputation for nation-building after running East Timor for two and a half years before independence in May 2002.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described Vieira de Mello’s administration of East Timor as “brilliant” when he named him UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in September last year.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, on March 15, 1948, Vieira de Mello is a UN veteran who has worked with the organization since his days as a philosophy student in Rio and later at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He is fluent in several languages.

Parallel to his studies, he began working for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Geneva in 1969, experience which led to later postings in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique and Peru.

With careful diplomatic skills, Vieira de Mello made a sharp contrast to his outspoken predecessor in the human rights job, Irish former president Mary Robinson.

He nevertheless reminded the United States and Britain at the start of the war in Iraq on March 20 of their obligations under international law as “occupying powers,” using an expression which grated on the ears of officials in the Bush administration.

On April 9, the day Baghdad fell to US forces, he said he was “deeply disturbed” by the growing number of civilian and media casualties. But Vieira de Mello has also toured countries surrounding Iraq urging them to support the new governing council appointed by the US administration. “We now have an institution that, while not democratically elected, can be viewed as broadly representative of the various constituencies in Iraq,” he said last week. “It means that we now have a formal body of senior and distinguished Iraqi counterparts, with credibility and authority, with whom we can chart the way forward.”

One member of the UN Security Council said Vieira de Mello was one of only two diplomatic “heavyweights” who stood out as obvious candidates for the Iraq post. The other was Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian former foreign minister who has been the top UN official in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taleban.

Vieira de Mello’s experience covers key parts of the United Nations system, from peacekeeping operations to refugees to humanitarian relief. In 1981, he was appointed principal political advisor to the UN force in south Lebanon, a post he held for two years before returning to Geneva and a series of management positions with the office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. He was briefly director of the center for clearing landmines in Cambodia before working in Bosnia during the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he worked for several months in 1996 as humanitarian coordinator for the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa and was then named UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees. In January 1998, Vieira de Mello was promoted to under-secretary general and put in charge of coordinating UN humanitarian operations. In June the following year, Annan sent him to Kosovo, where he spent three months as the province’s temporary administrator after the arrival of NATO troops. Almost immediately after handing over to the former French minister of health, Bernard Kouchner in Kosovo, Vieira de Mello was sent to East Timor as head of the UN peacekeeping mission — a post he was to hold until the territory became independent on May 20, 2002