When the UN Came Under Attack— from a Mis-Guided Rocket Launcher

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS (IPS)—When over 150 world leaders arrive in New York to address the high-level segment of the General Assembly beginning September 18, the UN neighborhood will be turned into a veritable war zone.

The streets will be crowded with scores of police officers, US secret service personnel, UN security officers, bomb-sniffing dogs, overhead helicopters, road closures– and a stand-by ambulance in the UN campus ready to cope with any medical emergencies.

The US Secret Service also has a priest ready to perform the last rites in case of any political assassinations in the UN premises. The only things missing are surveillance drones since a sign in the UN premises, perhaps half-jokingly, reads: NO DRONE ZONE.

Meanwhile, hundreds of UN staffers and journalists are double and triple-checked for their photo IDs, at least every 200 or 300 yards outside the UN building, reminiscent of security at the Pentagon and the CIA headquarters (where your visitor ID is programmed to automatically change colour, if you overstay your visit).

Still, in 1964, with relatively less security, the UN building came under attack – perhaps for the first time in the history of the world body—from a mis-guided rocket launcher.

When the politically-charismatic Ernesto Che Guevara, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under fire – literally.

The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevara from speaking.

A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed Secretariat building by the East River while a boisterous anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd street.

According to Wikipedia, the bazooka is the common name for a man-portable recoilless anti-tank rocket launcher, widely deployed by the US army, especially during World War II.

But the rocket launcher – which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles – missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the UN building.

One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”The African-American civil rights activist, the late Martin Luther King Jr. once famously said the US is home to “guided missiles and misguided men”.

As longtime U.N. staffers would recall, the failed bombing took place when Che Guevara launched a blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy.After his Assembly speech, Guevara was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavor,” he joked, as he chomped on his Cuban cigar, during a press conference.

When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the UN wall, intending to kill him, Che said: “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”

Asked if there were any other attacks on the UN, Samir Sanbar, a former assistant secretary-general and head of the Department of Public Information, told IPS the only other attack he could remember was the bombing of the UN office in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

He said two of his closest colleagues Sergio Viera de Mello and Nadia Younes died in that attack.

“Both did not wish to go but were pushed by someone who wanted them away,” said Sanbar, who served under five different secretaries-general.

That attack took place on 19 August 2003 when a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives into the UN headquarters in the Iraqi capital, and blew it up, killing 22 people – among them Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN mission in Iraq.

The attack on the Canal Hotel building also wounded more than 150; most of them aid workers who had come to Iraq to help reconstruct the country following the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The bombing was described as one of the most lethal in UN history, and marked a turning point in how the UN and aid groups operate in the field.

On August 18, the UN commemorated its annual World Humanitarian Day which was inaugurated 20 years ago to mark the Baghdad bombing.

Meanwhile, the attacks on UN peacekeeping forces have continued with 32 peacekeeping personnel — 28 military and four police, including one woman police officer — killed in attacks in 2022.

By nationality, the peacekeepers who died in 2022 were from Bangladesh (3), Chad (4), Egypt (7), Guinea (1), India (2), Ireland (1), Jordan (1), Morocco (1), Nepal (1), Nigeria (2), Pakistan (7), Russian Federation (1) and Serbia (1).

This brought the death toll to at least 494 United Nations and associated personnel who were killed in deliberate attacks in the past 12 years by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket-propelled grenades, artillery fire, mortar rounds, landmines, armed and successive ambushes, convoy attacks, suicide attacks and targeted assassinations.

Over the last 78 years, the United Nations and its specialised agencies, were awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize 12 times. One agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) received the prize in both 1954 and 1981.In 2001, the United Nations and then Secretary-General Kofi Annan of Ghana were awarded the prize “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world”.