In my corner, another civil servant — and also, I would say on the strength of a first 90-minute conversation in some depth, another good man — knew perfectly well that when you talk to a journalist nothing is off the record for ever as we "swapped notes" on the differences between the Americans' behaviour in Baghdad and that of the Brits in Basra.

I am not suggesting there that De Mello's death and those of other UN personnel among the victims was a direct result of the policies of the occupation forces in Iraq. On the "why?", the BBC's Paul Reynolds has already made an interesting first stab at an analysis.
Most of the analysis will come later, just as some of the "facts" will eventually out. Doing their best at "the factory", my own immediate colleagues are still quite properly wrapped up with the shocking event, its immediate aftermath, the quest for survivors and the fallout.
The same goes for yesterday's other brutal bombing of a central Jerusalem bus, with its similar toll. But that equally appalling crime is sadly of another order, part of a fearful but long-standing "pattern of death", with likely consequences which are only too predictable.

In the often frightening "New World Order", what happens in Israel and what journalists are not allowed to call Palestine makes some kind of shocking, tragic and historic sense. Unacceptable but understandable.
The savage murder of De Mello and almost a score of others is a far less immediately comprehensible consequence of the gross injustices and the resulting fanaticism which constitute the wicked side of that so-called order. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it "senseless".
Certainly it is one of the most brutal blows the United Nations has sustained since one of the Ghanaian's predecessors died in the Congo when his plane blew up in the air and crashed in September 1961.
There are those who contend that Dag Hammersköld, who supported the electoral process then in hand in that benighted country, was also assassinated. Film-maker Hans Rudiger Minow made an intriguing documentary about this, shown last April on Planète television (Historia article; French). He pinned it on a mining company and the Belgians.

When a teenager, I read Hammersköld's 'Markings'. The man said very many wise things.
"Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only a soldier can do it," was among them. Especially soldiers who work alongside people of the calibre of De Mello, whose brain and looks were enough to "melt the hearts of women in Sarajevo", Sonia also remarked.
In the blogosphere, Dave recalled another Hammersköld comment in February, when he said that "forgiveness breaks the chains of causality" (Joyce's Paradiso).
Yesterday's atrocity in the wake of barbarism by so many parties in the Middle and Near East could make forgiveness an even rarer quality than ever.