Hedi Annabi: What He Died for in Haiti

by James Traub

Hedi Annabi, the U.N. special representative killed in the earthquake, may not have been known to the public, but his mission stabilized a lawless Haiti—and his peacekeepers are leading the effort to save Haitians trapped in the rubble today.


It appears, as of this writing, that Hedi Annabi, the United Nations’ special representative in Haiti, was one of the thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, killed in Tuesday’s earthquake. A veteran of U.N. peacekeeping, Annabi was no more known to the public than any other U.N. lifer, and could scarcely have borne less resemblance to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing and impossibly handsome U.N. envoy who was killed in a truck bombing in Baghdad in 2003. George Clooney would have played de Mello in the movie; Annabi, an extra-dry and sometimes cryptic Tunisian, was more the Peter Sellers of Being There.

When I knew him, in 2004 and 2005, he served as deputy chief of the peacekeeping department in New York. An important part of his job was cajoling and browbeating reluctant countries into contributing troops to desperate missions often rather casually mandated by the U.N. Security Council. He once told me that in May 2000, after the council had decided to send thousands of troops to keep a band of psychotic killers known as the RUF from toppling the government of Sierra Leone, a delegation of 25 officials from the Clinton administration descended on his office. “And one of them just looked at me and said, ‘What are you going to do about this mess?’” Annabi said. “And I said, ‘Are you coming to tell me how I’m going to fix it with the troops you’re not giving me, or are you coming to help me figure out how to fix it? Because if it’s the first, this is going to be a short meeting.’”

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