Laura Dolci’s husband, Jean-Selim Kanaan, had been deployed by the UN Workplace for Challenge Companies to work as Particular Assistant to the Chief of Employees of the UN Help Mission for Iraq.
Twenty years after the assault and to mark World Humanitarian Day which is commemorated yearly on 19 August, she remembers her husband.
“Within the terrorist assault towards the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, I misplaced Jean-Selim Kanaan, my 33-year-old husband and father of our newly born son.
We had met in Bosnia, after which moved collectively to Kosovo and later to New York, fiercely in love and sharing the identical values and love for the blue flag. With him and our colleagues, a bit of me additionally died on that tragic day.
Laura Dolci and her late husband, Jean-Selim Kanaan.
Persevering with to work for the UN was a tough selection for me, however one which has helped me give function and which means within the face of that heinous legal act. I’m at the moment Secretary of the Common Periodic Assessment of the Human Rights Council.
The nineteenth of August is engraved in each cell of my physique. It’s a part of me and the lifetime of our household. It means a baby who grew up with out realizing his father. That two-ton bomb brutally maimed our household, however we held collectively, impressed by Jean-Selim’s sacrifice, and we carried on, giving which means to our existence and holding excessive the values of humanity and justice, at house and at work.
The assault and the UN’s response reveals that the world is complicated, with new threats rising.
But, it is a nice career, and I’m completely satisfied to see that the legacy of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the then UN Particular Consultant in Iraq who additionally died within the assault. He and his colleagues proceed to encourage the brand new era of UN civil servants within the subject.
I hope, nevertheless, that this twentieth anniversary can even be an event for the UN household to replicate on how greatest to function in right this moment’s complicated situations.
I hope the UN flag will regain its brightness. We want a stronger UN, negotiating for peace, mediating to stop and cease conflicts.
Our fallen colleagues would need simply that.”
