No More Heroes Any More?

[Danny Ocean]

I think there are, you just need to look for them.

I recently acquired another: Sergio Vieira de Mello. Heard of him? He died in 2003. I hadn't until I watched this documentary. British peeps can watch it on the iplayer [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011m9vy/Storyville_20102011_Fight_to_Save_the_World_Sergio/]. It's an hour and a half long in total, but it's very good:

Spoiler: Storyville 25: Sergio- The Fight to Save the World

For those who can't be bothered to sit down for an hour-and-a-half, here's his obituary from the BBC. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2146395.stm] The video is much more powerful though.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, a fifty-five-year-old Brazilian diplomat, had worked his entire adult life for the U.N. In thirty-four years of service, he had held posts in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo, and East Timor. Besides Portuguese, he spoke fluent English, French, Italian, and Spanish. In 2002, he had been promoted to High Commissioner for Human Rights. A reporter whom I met in the Balkans, where Vieira de Mello had served as a senior U.N. diplomat, aptly described him as a "cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy"; a strikingly handsome man, he was an idealist who pursued his goals with fierce pragmatism. When it served his agenda, he even made overtures to thugs. His colleague Carina Perelli, an Uruguayan who was head of the U.N. election division, called him an encantador de serpientes?a snake charmer. In the Balkans, he tried to win over the hard-line Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, by presenting him with a copy of The New York Review of Books featuring the headline "war over psychoanalysis." He joked that his autobiography would be called "My Friends the War Criminals."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/07/080107fa_fact_power#ixzz1OFVMCu8y

Regardless of what you think of the organisation, he was a great man.

Who are your lesser-known heroes? Heroes of our time?

This thread is also in the R+P forum. Not sure which it belonged in.