Two days in September – a personal note: Nigel Fisher

2 September 1998

In September 1998, I was living in Ottawa, Canada in the second half of a year’s leave from UNICEF. My wife Patsy and I had just returned home from a holiday in Nova Scotia. On 2 September, flight Swissair 111 from New York crashed into the sea just off the coast of Nova Scotia, with the loss of all on board, including not a few UN staff on their way to Geneva – colleagues and friends on board “the UN shuttle”. Carol Bellamy called from New York to ask me to go back to Halifax (the provincial capital) to offer any support I could to the bereaved families of deceased staff from UNICEF and other agencies – families who would be arriving there imminently.

On the plane to Halifax, I sat next to a local businessman. We talked and I told him why I was travelling. When we landed, he handed me the keys to his minivan, parked at the airport. He gave me his phone number and said: “Call me when you’ve finished what you came to do”. Just one of the countless acts of generosity and kindness on the part of many Nova Scotians at that time.

I accompanied family members to the daily update sessions at the Lord Nelson Hotel, but mainly used the van to take families wherever they wanted to go, any time of day or night, in the city, but more often, to get out of town, to enable them to walk or sit somewhere by the sea, far away from the crowds, in silent grief and remembrance. One family went swimming in the sea, to be closer to their loved one.

Eyes were constantly moist. I kept it together much of the time, but completely broke down when I went to the airport where, laid out on long tables, were random belongings of lost passengers, garnered from the massive debris field. Several family members came in the hope that they might find something, but one family did not want to go and asked me to do so in their stead. In among the piles, I found the brief case of their lost one - a good friend who had worked with UNHCR. I couldn’t hold it together anymore and sat weeping on the ground.

I stayed in Halifax about a week – a week of great sadness, but also of family members remembering the best of their loved ones – even with occasional laughter amongst the tears.

The businessman and I were unable to rendezvous so that I could return his van, so I just parked it at his house, with a note of thanks inside and took a cab to the airport.

(Note: I have deliberately refrained from referring by name to any Swissair 111 colleagues and friends, or their families).

xxxxx

11 September 2001

In September 2001, I was RD for South Asia, living in Kathmandu. In the second week of September, I travelled to New York for a Global Management Team meeting.

Early morning of 11 September: a conference call on the coming winter hardships in Afghanistan, followed by a meeting on the 11th floor. “A small plane has hit one of the WTC towers”. Just after 9am, a whispered message to Carol Bellamy: “A second plane has hit”. “This is no accident”. Down to the second floor, with colleagues in EMOPS’ Operations Centre - gasps, silence, watching the towers burn, cries as they collapsed. The call to evacuate UN buildings. Walking on Second Avenue, as growing numbers of people trudged north, silently, covered in dust and blood. Periodically breaking the silence, the wailing sirens of vehicles heading south. I had checked out of my hotel that morning, planning to fly out later that day. Nowhere to stay, so I slipped back into Unicef House and slept on an office floor. The next night, on the floor of a colleague’s apartment, then several nights at another colleague’s place. I walked several times down to Canal Street and below, the fallen ribs of the WTC a few blocks south. Exhausted, dust-covered policemen and firemen. On fences and walls, hand-made posters with photos: ”Have you seen........”... Groups of people gathered around flickering candles at night.

Carol called together the RDs of CEE-CIS, MENA and ROSA – Philip O’Brien, Ibrahima Doc Fall and myself. “This means Afghanistan, one of you needs to go”. A few days later, when some flights out of New York resumed, I flew to Montreal to say goodbye to my family, then on to Islamabad, where, for the next few months, I oversaw emergency programs for Afghanistan and cross-border operations, together with Eric Laroche, then Afghanistan country rep. Negotiations with Taliban leaders and the US-led coalition to enable WHO and Unicef to support polio vaccination days in Afghanistan (that’s another story – the vaccination days took place successfully, before and after the war started on 7 October). Evacuation of international staff from Afghanistan when the conflict broke out. Agreement with the Taliban health minister to allow Unicef national staff in Kabul to communicate with us in Islamabad – “ as long as the conversations are in Pashto and you only discuss operational issues”. Trips to the border, each time to meet briefly with Afghan colleagues coming from Kabul.

Our small team started planning for post-war (whenever that would be) programming in Afghanistan. I came to know Lakhdar Brahimi, who was intimately involved in developing the Bonn Agreement of December 2001, laying the groundwork for governance and reconstruction in post-war Afghanistan. (He was deeply disturbed that the Taliban was excluded from the agreement – “No good will come of this exclusion; they should be inside the tent, not outside”). He was planning for a post-Bonn Accords expanded UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). I was nominated as one of thirteen candidates for the UNAMA DSRSG post. The two ‘finalists’ were interviewed by Kofi Annan on the sidelines of the January 2002 Tokyo conference on the reconstruction of Afghanistan. “Nigel, what kind of person would take on this task?” Response: “An idiot”.

I got the job.

Post script

My memory may be somewhat at fault after all this time. My apologies. These brief vignettes omit so many people and so many details. Above all, they don’t begin to pay tribute to the many who lost their lives on those two days in September, three years apart. The best I can do is to pay tribute to them with a few lines I wrote after being in Rwanda in 1994:

There are some you carry with you
Their image clear and fresh in your mind
They are now, not yesterday
They are here, not half a world away
They are your always, they are your never again.

West Vancouver
11 September, 2023

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